


Control

by biblionerd07



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 18:15:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biblionerd07/pseuds/biblionerd07
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reminiscing about Jeremy leads Bass to tell Miles the truth about what happened, and the boys work through their issues.  (Or not.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Control

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey, what's up, I'm just watching Miloe videos and crying and eating peanut M&Ms because I am a functioning adult human. This is another little piece that has no identifiable place in the Revolution timeline, which would make me feel worse if it weren't for the way the actual writers of the show jump around with their timeline.

Miles hated gathering firewood. He couldn’t really explain why, except that it had something to do with a lot of bending and stooping and it hurt his back and made him feel old. He was slow at it, because of the aforementioned bending and stooping, and there was Bass, hopping around, spry as a damn meadowlark or…something spry. Miles was grumpy.

“You gonna make it, grandpa?” Bass knew, of course, how old Miles felt, and was exploiting that. Miles glared at him.

“You’re gonna fall and break your neck.” He said irritably, making himself sound even more like a grandpa. Bass laughed.

“You know I have the footing of a mountain goat.”

“I know you’ll eat anything, like a mountain goat.” Miles was muttering about the similarities between Bass and a mountain goat, but he didn’t really know much about mountain goats. Or any other kind of goat. He knew goats ate tin cans or something, and Bass was notoriously not picky about what food he ate. He had once literally raced a dog to get to a burger that had fallen on the ground at a park. He’d been five, but Miles still used it as evidence against him when the situation arose.

“You’re just jealous.” Bass threw over his shoulder as he did some kind of gymnastics pirouette shit on a log, stuff he remembered watching his sisters do gracefully and effortlessly in a chalky, smelly gym while he sat on a hard bench for four hours waiting for about 5 minutes of action. He had no idea what he was doing, really—he was just trying to piss Miles off, which was really so easy to do.

“I’m not gonna be jealous when you slip and lose your balls.” Miles pointed out. Bass rolled his eyes, but the sudden mental image of that possibility made him return both feet to solid ground. Miles was mostly picking up kindling, so Bass complied with the unspoken order of things and looked for bigger pieces.

“Remember when Jeremy went balls first on that rock?” Miles asked, laughing at the memory. They’d been washing up in a stream and Jeremy, clumsy even at the best of times back then, had lost his footing on the slippery rocks. Bass laughed too.

“I thought he was going to drown because he wouldn’t get up.”

“What was his excuse?” Miles knew it was something ridiculous, because Jeremy always had ridiculous excuses. If it wasn’t a bear attacking him and making him lose a store of berries, it was a ghost who’d popped out and scared him so he’d screamed like a girl.

“A shark.” Bass was smiling, but he looked wistful. He set his stack down.

“Bass?”

Bass turned to look at him, biting his lip. “I just kinda…wish he was here.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Miles admitted. Jeremy had been a bit of an oaf when they’d found him, but he was good to have on your side. Plus he was funny as hell and could diffuse a lot of the tension between Bass and Miles in the later years, when every conversation ended in disagreement and tight lips and drinking too much. “We’ll get those patriot bastards who killed him.” Miles assured Bass. Bass looked even worse, his eyes shining with tears now.

“The patriots didn’t kill Jeremy.” He said quietly. He covered his face with his hands and Miles felt horror rise in his stomach.

“ _What did you do_?” Miles growled, Jeremy’s face with that ever-present smirk flashing through his mind.

“He was trying to kill me.” Bass wasn’t indignant, the way he got about a lot of his screw-ups. Miles studied his face and saw bone-weariness there, enough to make Miles concerned. He opened his mouth, ready to say Jeremy never would’ve turned on Bass, but quickly snapped it shut. A lot of people would’ve said the same about Miles. He thought of how Jeremy said Bass had changed and how Jeremy had been pushy about some of his ideas for the Republic, trying to implement some of them without even asking Bass first.

Maybe it wasn’t so hard to believe.

“What did he do?” Miles asked. Bass looked up quickly.

“You believe me?” Something about the way he asked made Miles sad. Miles hadn’t been big on faith in Bass as of late, and it sounded like no one else had been, either. From what Miles had heard, Bass had maybe gotten a little paranoid, but Miles had planted those seeds, too—not just by pulling a gun on him in the middle of the night, but by insisting he be more cautious. As president of the Republic, Bass had a lot of people who wanted him dead, and Miles had insisted on stricter security around Bass. He’d suggested someone to taste-test Bass’s food before he ate it, but Bass had refused, saying he’d take poison over someone eating half his food. Miles wondered if he’d changed his mind about that later, the way he’d given in to sleeping with guards outside his door after Miles left.

“I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it’s possible.” Miles said with a shrug. Bass stared at his hands for a minute.

“He convinced me to go out. Get a drink. I said no when he asked, he pushed, I gave in and then…someone tried to assassinate me. And I thought…well, it just seemed like he planned it.” Bass sounded tortured, though Miles couldn’t decide about what—about Jeremy betraying him or about killing Jeremy.

“Hey. Bass. Look at me.” Miles ordered. Bass looked up slowly, blinking away tears. “I believe you.” Miles said simply. “It sounds like he was trying to kill you. You had to kill him.”

“I got so paranoid.” Bass whispered, his eyes on Miles but not seeing him. “I thought…I thought everyone was plotting behind my back.” He laughed a little, the horrible laugh he laughed when he was crying and the world was falling apart and nothing was funny, the laugh from the cemetery that still haunted Miles’s dreams some nights. “He told me I made everyone turn on me. And he was right. Too much bad whiskey and too much war and too many people hating me. I just…I went crazy.” He finally focused on Miles again, realized everything he’d said, and decided to take a seat on a stump, picking idly at the bark beneath him to avoid Miles’s eyes.

“A lot of people _did_ want you dead.” Miles said. _Including me._ Except he hadn't. Not really. Or he did. He still wasn't sure. His heart was hammering. Bass wouldn’t look at him.

“Well, I forgave some of them.” Bass said softly. Miles felt his heart miss a beat before stuttering on again. The air was so thick between them with what they weren’t saying Bass could have twirled across it like that log from earlier. “Maybe I should’ve forgiven more of them.”

“You did what you thought was best.” Miles allowed. He wanted to say Bass shouldn’t have killed Jeremy, but Miles knew if he’d been there he would’ve done the same. Even to Jeremy. After all, what had he done to Alec?

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. They caught the guy, Miles. My men caught the guy. Tortured him. Said he didn’t have any coconspirators. So now I think about it to try to tell myself Jeremy did it, just so I didn’t kill the last friend I had left for no reason. I think about how it happened, picture the angles. And maybe he really was in on it. It’s still amazing they didn’t hit him. But I don’t know. And I just killed him. Just…killed him. Like that. The worst part was he…well, he told me everything I already knew.”

Miles couldn’t believe this was happening. Bass was always so sure of everything—full of bravado and swagger. And Miles could always tell when it was empty blustering, but this self-conscious, self-hatred thing was not Bass.

If only Miles’s objective, all those years ago, had been to destroy Bass; he could have sat back and admired his own handiwork, crowed over his cleverness and success. Instead he wanted some outlet, some way to feel the pain on his skin that he felt inside himself; he wanted to claw at himself, longed for a car to drive into a wall, to hurt him as much as he deserved. He had done this to Bass.

He had forced Bass to follow him—not at first, no, following him to Chicago had been Bass’s idea, sure, but Miles wanted the Militia, Miles wanted to change the world, and Miles pushed Bass into it, too, made Bass into the President, told Bass torturing people was required, told Bass they were justified, before turning on him, turning tail and running. Miles pressed his hands to his temples. There weren’t words for this situation. Miles wasn’t deft with words in the best of times, which was part of the reason Bass had been the President, but this situation, this horrible crime, was light years away from his reach.

“Sorry.” Miles whispered. It was just one word, and it was the only word he could get out. Once upon a time, Bass would know just how many crimes one sorry was supposed to count for. Once upon a time, Bass would accept a sorry with a mere shrug, because nothing Miles could have done would require more than that.

Bass looked up at him and just stared, the intensity beaming out of those blue eyes more than Miles could take. But Miles forced himself to hold the eye contact, forced himself to take the pain he saw in Bass’s eyes.

“Sorry.” Bass echoed. Miles couldn’t read it, couldn’t tell if Bass was mocking him, returning the apology, or just processing the word. It made him feel worse. He was supposed to know Bass. He was supposed to _still_ know Bass, even after everything was shot to hell.

“I should’ve stayed.” Miles said. He had actual tears in his eyes, though he turned his head away from Bass now to hide it. _I shouldn’t have made you do all those things. I shouldn’t have tried to kill you. I shouldn’t have taken out how I felt about myself on you._ It’s what Miles meant, but he couldn’t say it. Bass stood up and walked toward Miles slowly, deliberately. Miles prepared himself for a punch. Instead, Bass’s arms went around Miles, just like his hallucination when he’d been suffocating. Bass was hugging him, and Miles couldn’t help it—he folded into the touch, his arms automatically encircling Bass, just like in his hallucination.

He wanted to apologize again, apologize for a thousand years, apologize until his voice ran out, but he couldn’t say anything. Bass was holding on for dear life, squeezing the air out of him, and Miles knew he was squeezing back just as hard. He could feel Bass’s tears on his neck. With one last squeeze, Bass pulled back, and Miles mourned the loss of the contact, mourned the fact that Bass had never, not once in their lives, broken off a hug first.

“We should get back to everyone else.” Bass murmured, not meeting Miles’s eyes. Miles nodded. He knew he had no right to feel as disappointed as he did. What did he expect? He and Bass would hug and everything would be back to normal, back to how things were before Bass slipped into madness and Miles disappeared only to show up again with a gun to Bass’s head, back to how things were before they chased each other around full of death threats and sword fights and bullets? They couldn’t fix everything with a few words and a hug.

The air between them felt empty now, depleted of even the positive headway they’d made, and now Miles couldn’t look at Bass, because he’d honestly thought, for a second, that they’d be fine again after that. He was ashamed that he’d thought it and ashamed that it wasn’t true. Bass wasn’t as forgiving as he used to be. Bass was closed up now, not looking at Miles, keeping his mask in place so that Miles couldn’t even tell he was affected in any way by what had happened, left wondering if he cared at all.

Miles had always told Bass to control his emotions, and it looked like he’d finally learned.


End file.
